A question for the webmasters here.

Which is pretty much all of you

What are your thoughts regarding the amount of individual forums you should have in your message board?

Do you add them as the need develops, or do you go ahead and anticipate the future, create the forums, and let them set there for when they will be needed?

Case in point. I have a football forum, and in my college football forum, I was thinking about adding subforums for all the major conferences. The College football forum gets very little traffic right now, but as traffic in the forum grows, I would like to already have these forums in place. Otherwise, I am sure I will end up with a group of people that complains about the change, when if it would have been that way when they got there, they never would have thought twice about it.

If I make these forums, they will be empty for the most part for a few months probably, unless vbseo kicks me into high gear with traffic very soon

It's a tough call. Lots of empty forums looks bad, and is comfusing for members. But, splitting all the threads out later once you have a lot of them is also a lot of work.

Keep it as simple as possible, biggest mistake most people make is creating too many forums and this could be the make or break for a forum.

Create them only if it's needed.. if possible summarise the forums into smaller groups so later on your can expand them out.

Well, if I did it, it would be in subforums, and I have those set up in columns, rather than the default way.

Upon looking at the forum home page, it wouldnt look dead, only if you went to the actual forum.

I already have it done with the NFL teams, but the more I think about it, the more I think it would be better to wait on the college conferences, at least until traffic starts going into the main college football forum.

Cant make up my mind

I would add as the need comes myself. Then once you believe it can support it fully create the forums and then start moving all the threads that you can find into the new forums to make it look active

Originally Posted by BrentWilson

I would add as the need comes myself. Then once you believe it can support it fully create the forums and then start moving all the threads that you can find into the new forums to make it look active

That seems to be the consensus here and that is what I will do.

Thanks everyone for the advice. I am getting to the point that I would rather ask all my forum and seo questions here as opposed to anywhere else. You actually get help and "real" advice here.

Yeah definitely a good idea. All members here (including myself) have alot of experience running online communities and also have good SEO advice to boot.